


My house being now at rest

by praycambrian



Category: True Detective
Genre: Alternate Universe - Apocalypse, F/M, Getting Together, Multi, Pandemics, Road Trips
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2020-06-26
Updated: 2020-07-19
Packaged: 2021-03-03 19:09:10
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 3
Words: 10,085
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/24930565
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/praycambrian/pseuds/praycambrian
Summary: Marty wasn’t surprised to see him. If anyone had been made for the apocalypse it was Rust fucking Cohle.In ’96, the virus starts, spreads. The three of them do what they have to do.
Relationships: Rustin "Rust" Cohle/Maggie Hart/Martin "Marty" Hart
Comments: 20
Kudos: 18
Collections: Fic Journal of the Plague Year





	1. Chapter 1

**Author's Note:**

> Although this work doesn’t graphically discuss the (fictional) virus itself, its entire conceit is reacting to a viral pandemic, which may be too much for some folks, given [gestures broadly at 2020]. There’s also one non-graphic instance of dubious consent/coerced sex/sex for favors in chapter 2 (not among tagged relationship), so steer clear of that if you need to. As always, please reach out if you want clearer tags or more specific information about the warnings. 
> 
> Title from “[Dark Night of the Soul](https://en.wikisource.org/wiki/The_Dark_Night_of_the_Soul_\(Peers_translation\)),” by Saint John of the Cross, translated by E. Allison Peers.

Marty opened the door with his gun already drawn. The power had quit for good sometime in the night, taking the streetlamps with it, and in the dim early light Rust looked like a shadow punched out of the air. Like the quiet neighborhood was just some paper-thin backdrop over whatever menace had apparently been waiting underneath the whole time—god damn Rust and his philosophies—just the thinnest stage prop, and someone had peeled away a human-shaped hole in it, and there was Rust. Marty wasn’t surprised to see him. If anyone had been made for the apocalypse it was Rust fucking Cohle. 

“Are the girls packed?” Rust said, ignoring the gun. 

“Yeah.” Marty holstered it. “We were thinking Maggie’s parent’s house. It’s out in the country.”

“Not good enough.” Rust strode inside, taking in the fat flashlight beaming eerily into the living room, the suitcases waiting by the door. “Where’s Maggie?”

“Rust?” Maggie stood in the hall, face pale and set. She had a gun too. The girls peeked out of their room, wide-eyed. 

Rust stared as if he’d never seen them before. “Let’s go,” he said.

She put the gun back in her pocket. “Where?”

Rust shook his head. He didn’t look at the girls. “Later. We gotta go, Maggie.” 

“Mom?” Maisie said uncertainly. 

Maggie was still looking at Rust. Marty felt the hair rise on the back of his neck like he’d walked into a storm, the air was so thick with what they weren’t saying. Like that first night at dinner, when he’d come back from trying to bail out his trainwreck partner’s drunk, pathetic ass and found the two of them sitting there at the table, the silence full of the weeds he’d later come to learn meant Sophia. Weird to be thinking not of the virus but of this—that Rust had told Maggie right away when she asked, no hesitation but as few words as he could get away with. It was Marty who got the name, later, Rust’s grief an empty glass Maggie held out for Marty to fill. 

“I’m leaving a note,” Maggie said. 

Rust wouldn’t have allowed it for Marty, but Marty wouldn’t have thought to do it. “Just be quick,” Rust said.

Marty loaded the car. Down the street, the Carmichaels’ curtains twitched. He didn’t look. Rust and Maggie tore through the kitchen cabinets for non-perishables. Marty bundled the girls into the backseat, and when they whined about leaving their toys, their books, he told them to shut the hell up. He hardly recognized his own voice. They clammed up and stayed that way. Rust wedged a couple more boxes into the bed of his truck, strapped the tarp back in place. When Maggie came out of the house with an armful of blankets and locked the door behind her, the realization hit Marty in the stomach—his world was ending—and he had to brace himself against the car.

“Not the time, Marty,” Rust said. “We gotta go.”

“Fuck you, man. You think we’re just gonna follow you out of here on nothing but your say-so? You think we’re gonna take our _girls?”_

“Yeah,” Rust said. “You are.” 

It was his flat voice, his hand-in-hand-into-oblivion voice. Marty’s temples started thumping with rage. Maggie grabbed Marty’s arm. All of a sudden it wasn’t like the fury went anywhere—he was still so mad he could have slammed Rust’s stony face right into the side of his stupid truck—but like someone had taken the lid off him like a bug in a jar, the world opening up over him, too big to give a fuck if he was mad or scared or anything at all. 

Marty met Rust’s gaze. He couldn’t read him. A year should’ve been enough time to get a handle on anyone, especially the year they’d had, but the more of Rust Marty grasped the more slipped through his fingers. It wasn’t a question of trust—he trusted him. It was that Marty didn’t like the way Rust reminded him of Maggie: both of them like a lake whose depth you only realized when you were floating out in the middle of it, sun warm on your face, the water’s full weight cold and silent beneath you. 

Rust turned the ignition and the truck guttered to life, too loud on the empty street. “You gotta follow me close,” he said. “Don’t lose me.” 

Marty nodded.

“Where are we going?” Maggie said. Her hand had moved down to hold Marty’s wrist. 

“Alaska,” Rust said. 

Marty drove. Maggie sat in the front seat, scraping her thumbnail over her lip. The girls whispered quietly in the back until they fell asleep. Maggie spent a long time looking at them in the rearview. They were entirely outside of her now. They had been for years. She wanted to fold the car up around them like an oyster shell and seal it. 

Rust took them out on twisting back roads, avoiding the highways as much as possible. Eight hours in they had to stop for gas and the two of them stood guard, hands on their holsters, while Maggie filled the tanks and the extra canisters in the truck bed. She moved quick but calm, steady. The day was a patient bleeding out too quick and Maggie was a nurse, her fortitude the only thing staunching the wound long enough for help to arrive. 

Somewhere outside Corsicana they ran into a blockade of state troopers clustered tensely around their parked cars, silent, the lights flashing. Everyone in masks and tac vests. 

“Play it cool, baby,” Marty said. “We talked about this.” 

Rust was already out of the truck, speaking lowly to the officer in charge. He showed his badge cupped in his palm, gestured to Maggie. 

“Dr. Hart?” the officer said. The mask blurred his voice. 

“Yes, that’s me.” Maggie held out her Lafayette General ID badge and driver’s license as if she was just getting carded at a bar. 

They were on their way to the virology research lab in La Jolla, they explained, so Dr. Hart could join the team working on a cure. Someone high up somewhere had decided a discreet, low-profile escort would be safer, they said. The smoking ruins of the CDC convoy were one of the last things broadcast on the news before the power went out. Rust didn’t even have to mention it by name, just had to say “after—” and let the ashes come up in their minds on its own. 

A long brittle moment, Maggie’s pulse red in her ears. And then the officer signaled for a section of road to be cleared.

“Do your best out there, Dr. Hart,” he said. His face was completely hidden, his voice like gravel. “Lot of people counting on you.”

“I promise,” Maggie said. Then she walked back to the car. 

“Why aren’t they letting anyone else through?” Maisie said. Audrey craned around in her seat to see the blockade reform behind them: cars bottlenecked like beetles on the other side.

“They need people to stay home so the virus doesn’t spread,” Maggie said. 

“Then why’d they let us through?”

“Because mom lied,” Audrey said. 

“Girls, that’s enough,” Marty said. 

Hours slipped by. A deserted six-car pileup forced them off the freeway, onto a frontage road shivering with Texas heat. Rust had the siren on the dash, set it wailing whenever they needed to brazen their way past the sheeplike traffic clogging the off ramps. Night came down. They snaked through the flat landscape, the falling darkness. Rust’s tail lights glowed ahead of them, unblinking. 

When the girls fell asleep Marty finally glanced at her and said, “You doing okay, honey?” as if the girls didn’t have ears like bats even then. 

Maggie wondered how many of those troopers had had kids. If the officer she spoke to would go home—whenever he’d be able to go home, making his way through the smoke of magnesium flares and charred barricades—if he had a family, if he’d tell them about the doctor he met who was going to help find a cure, and how everything would be okay soon. She thought of last January: Rust sitting at her kitchen table, a rag wrung so tight it gave up a few more drops of water than you thought it had left: _she passed_. Rust in the diner, cigarette cupped inward like its burning end was something he could keep away from her: _kids are the only thing that matter, Maggie._

The girls had slumped over their seatbelts, curled toward each other in their sleep. The night before they left, after Marty gave up trying to call and call the station for some kind of order, he’d stood for over an hour watching them shift on the bottom bunk, dreaming. Sweat growing under his hand on Maggie’s elbow. She’d been certain of him so rarely in their lives it was almost like a bruise to feel it then. That after everything, it had taken the end of the world to make him solid in her hands again. 

“Yeah,” Maggie said. “I’m fine.”

They ate on the road but they had to stop to piss—taut exposed minutes, orange daylight humming in Rust’s inner ear like flies in a sodium lamp—and for Marty and Maggie to switch off who was driving or sleeping. Rust made it fifteen hours from the Harts’ front door before the two-way radio crackled to life and Marty’s voice came through, dripping indigo with exhaustion. “You ain’t Superman, Rust.”

He let Marty take the wheel, shuffle him into the backseat. He lay there for a time that swelled and shrank like ice in the crack of a rock, unsure if he was awake or asleep, if he was inside the world or stuck algae-like to its edges. He hallucinated a pulse of pale black light burning where Marty’s headrest should’ve been, pouring down the seat to pool on the floor, rising until he couldn’t see anything else. 

“Rust,” Marty said. His cornflower voice blooming through the vision. “Go the fuck to sleep.” 

Rust swallowed what was left of the Quaaludes and the world billowed in on him like a circus tent with vanished poles. 

When he woke the sun was coming up over the desert, windchime-pink.

“How long we been stopped,” he grated out, rubbing at his eyes, the film of cold sweat all over him.

“Bout forty-five minutes,” Marty said. 

“Too long.”

“Shut the fuck up. Ain’t seen another soul for three hours. There’s nothing here.” Marty gestured and Rust followed the movement like a drunk following a penlight: faint smear of mountains to the south, yucca silhouetted to the north, everywhere else a bowl scraped clean. “Girls needed to walk around. You needed to look a little less like a puppet after someone took their hand out of it. Maggie pulled some food together. Everything’s fine.”

Rust followed Marty’s arm back to his chest, his neck, his face. He looked like shit. But the gloss of that impenetrable delusion had settled back into him like it had never left: he was a good man who did good things, and he would be rewarded. They’d outrun the virus, no matter than it was possible one of them had it already, and his family would be safe. Rust found, with a lick of numb surprise, that he didn’t care to unfold the sandpaper of his mind, scrub hard against Marty’s dumb assurance. Not just then. 

“What?” Marty said. “I know that look. If you’re about to start spouting off about the inevitability of our own destruction, or the emptiness of the desert being a crucible for man’s ignorance or whatever, you can zip it right now.”

“Your family’s here.” Rust watched the girls climb up to sit on the hood of the car, their hair loose. Maggie started to comb out the tangles, twist them into braids. “I told you, I’m not a maniac.”

“Uh-huh,” said Marty. “Here, have a power bar.”

The cover story had held up at every blockade, but California was completely locked down, so they slipped over the Mexican border outside Yuma. They were barely four hours from the coast, near the end of the long haul: the dust of hope got in all their eyes, made them wild. The girls threw themselves into a screaming match and had to be separated. Audrey was sent to ride with Rust. 

“Put your seatbelt on,” he said. He rolled the window down and breathed his cigarette smoke out into the thick white air. 

“You’re not wearing one.”

Rust never heard _do as I say, not as I do_ until he came south, learned about television. His pop had shown him everything: how to walk in snow and ice, how to make warmth, find water, track, kill, skin game, cook, clean, gather, shelter. How to weigh yourself against what the world demanded. There was no difference in their actions because if there were they’d be dead. 

Rust buckled his seatbelt one-handed. It wasn’t worth fighting. He’d already yoked himself to the Harts’ survival somewhere a lot farther back than two thousand miles. 

“Happy?” he said. 

“No,” Audrey, petulance staining her voice plum. 

“Audrey.”

She glared out the window. Sophia had never gotten old enough for anger. Tantrums, yes, but not a person’s anger, not the anger that comes from understanding how you’ve been failed. Rust and Claire had had each other for that.

“You’re not my dad,” Audrey said. 

“No, and if you get hurt he won’t have to kill me because I’ll do it myself. Put on your damn seatbelt.”

She looked at the side of his face she could see, then yanked the belt into place. “Why do you even care.”

“Couldn’t tell you,” he said. “Too late now, though.”


	2. Chapter 2

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Be warned, this chapter discusses dubious consent/sex for favors (offscreen, not between tagged relationship).

They hit the coast at Rosalito, parked next to a fledgling tent city outside a gutted casino. Rust disappeared for two hours, came back with the news a smuggler had agreed to sail them up the coast, and then dropped his body like a stone in the cab of the truck. 

“I’m worried about him,” Maggie said. She didn’t look away from watching the girls kick a soccer ball around with some other kids.

“We got bigger things to worry about,” Marty said. 

“Like what? The virus? The cartels?” Maggie scoffed. “Marty, doesn’t it bother you, watching him scrape himself to the bone like this?”

Marty knew Rust had taken a key of coke with him to open negotiations with the locals. It was familiar: the red locker, Crash’s rangy stride. Marty didn’t really think about it—those weeks he’d spent haunting Rust’s meticulous white rooms, watching Rust watch himself unravel like a game warden monitoring the spread of wolves reintroduced to a patch of wilderness—but it was the way he didn’t think about his own bones, unless they broke. 

They’d been burning themselves out to save two kids back then, too, though they hadn’t known it, and they hadn’t quite managed. This time there were three of them trying. Maybe that would make a difference. 

“It’s nothing new for him,” Marty said.

“That just makes it worse.”

“Why are you so concerned about him? All this time, since I first paired up with him, you’ve been falling all over yourself to have him over for dinner, orchestrate his love life, ask how he’s _feeling_. Why?”

“Jealousy’s never been a good look on you, Marty,” she said coolly. “I understand it’s difficult for you to imagine caring about another person in a way that doesn’t involve fuzzy handcuffs and a bottle of wine, but that doesn’t mean I’m incapable of it.”

That bug-in-a-jar rage again. Marty got up stiffly and went to buy breakfast from an old lady set up with a camp stove and a bag of tortillas, and when he came back he said, “I can care about people.”

“Sure, Marty.”

Without looking at her: “I care about you.” 

She called the girls back to eat. When they’d run off again Maggie said, “I remember falling in love with you.”

“Me too,” Marty said, grateful for easy ground.

“I don’t want to do that again.”

“What’s that supposed to mean?”

“It means—” Maggie looked at him, sun gold on her cheeks— “It means, don’t make me have to.” 

That evening Rust led them to a deserted cove. They turned over the cars and the gas cans—and the locker with the AK-47, the hand grenades, the rest of the coke—to three unsmiling men and one smiling woman, who immediately packed up and drove off down the beach. Rust held a brief argument in Spanish with the gray-bearded man standing by the waterline. When he turned back his face was blank.

“He changed his mind,” Rust said. “No guns.” 

They handed over their weapons. Marty kept one hand on Maisie’s shoulder, Maggie one hand on Audrey’s. The captain watched them calmly. He was shorter than Marty but barrel-broad and tough. His eyes slid from face to face before landing back on Rust, who said something to him, molasses-low. 

“You do not leave our sight, do you understand?” Maggie said to the girls.

“Mom, where are we—”

“You are _always_ with me, or your dad, or Rust. Do you understand, Audrey?”

“Yes, mom,” she whispered. 

“Maisie,” Marty said. Her shoulder felt like a bird’s under his hand. She nodded, wide-eyed.

Rust’s contraband bargaining had bought them a single dingy cabin next to the engine room. His snake-lidded Crash stare and Marty’s clenched fists bought them privacy. The girls played I Spy out of the grubby porthole, contested endless rounds of Go Fish. Twice a day Rust or Marty ventured to the galley for plates of beans and rice. Now and then they all went up on deck for air. The crew ignored them. They peered out at the vast ocean, the coastline sometimes visible like a wrinkle to the east, the girls trying to guess where they were. Los Angeles? San Francisco?

With each hour, Marty’s life slipped further away, heavy under the waves. Even when Maggie had kicked him out he’d had something to grab onto—the case, Rust, Rust telling him honestly _I think she’s softening._ Even after the world ended he’d been able to drive. To make choices and see they mattered. 

Now he felt small, empty, scrabbling. A fucking bug in that fucking jar. For so long he’d been so steady, but there were no more secrets propping that up anymore, no scaffolding between him and the world—no Saints game and spaghetti, no dirt and misery pressed in manila folders to open and close, no glimmering line leading from a payphone to a bed smelling of strawberries. Nothing. Just him. 

At night he laid awake against Maggie’s warm back with the girls sprawled bony and restless over them both. Rust curled on the floor and breathed. Marty knew he was awake. Maggie tossed and turned. Every night the urge to whisper something pressed against his teeth like a bug in a chrysalis, flexing closer and closer to the air. Only Marty didn’t know what he’d say.

Maggie and Marty took turns telling the girls stories: G-rated versions of their early dates, ghost stories, things they remembered about growing up. Marty grinned at Maggie every time he won a laugh out of the girls: _see? I told you I can do this._ His pride so pitifully honest she felt like bruising her lips on his crooked teeth. 

Rust was always scratching away at a notebook, but Maggie felt his attention on them just the same. She caught him looking once or twice. Let him catch her looking back. It wasn’t that she wanted him because he wanted her, because he didn’t, not precisely, not the way she was used to being wanted. And it wasn’t that she didn’t want Marty, who’d long since set within her like a bone that would have to be rebroken to be fully healed. 

Rust moved through his life clear and brutal as ice water. Maggie wanted to dive under, come up shaking, bright, breathing deep. 

Once she woke to see Rust slinking back into the cabin in the middle of the night. At first she thought she was still dreaming—something about a bayou, a party—so she was surprised to see him like that, a raw shadow, when in the dream he’d been soft and bronze with a glass of lemonade in his hand.

“Rust?” she said.

He froze. A small wedge of moonlight came in through the porthole, brought half of his face out of the gloom. 

“Go back to sleep,” he whispered. 

His voice like ripped paper. A tone she’d heard before. Four or five months after that case with the girl from Erath, those kids, Maggie had woken for no reason she could discern and wandered down the hall to check on the girls, who were fine. The kitchen light was still on. Marty and Rust on each side of the island. Something about their posture, the red cherry of Rust’s cigarette despite his unspoken promise not to smoke in her house, had stopped her in the hall. Rust sounded now like he had then: _Go to bed, Marty. I told you, I lack the constitution_. 

“What’s going on,” Maggie said softly. 

“Nothing. Couldn’t sleep.” 

“Bullshit,” she said. 

Marty snuffled deeper into her shoulder and the girls stretched, settled.

Rust looked between them. Maggie felt some pressure shift under her hands, like a lung collapsing in a patient lying silent on the table. Before he could stop her she looped her hand around his knee and pulled him forward so abruptly he stumbled, braced himself on their bunk, trying to be quiet. He smelled like sweat—they all did, their last shower had been wading through saltwater—and like something else. 

At first she thought he was just hiding the fact of sex with another man. Then she realized he was trying not to flinch away from her: a delayed reflex. Her memory offered up Rust knee-deep in surf, his face like stone, the captain’s gaze on him heavy, expectant.

“Oh, Rust, no,” Maggie whispered. “Rust. I’m so sorry.”

He pulled away. Folded himself into his pile of blankets on the floor. 

“I’ve paid worse for less,” he said quietly. 

“Did you—was it instead of me? The girls?”

“No need. He ain’t into women.”

“How long?” 

“Come on, Maggie,” which meant it had been happening from the first night: he was annoyed at her asking a question she already knew the answer to. 

“Jesus, Rust,” she whispered. “Do you even...I mean, are you—”

“Your family’s safe, Maggie. What does it matter.”

“Rust, of course it matters.” The memory of him in a stained undershirt, folding a napkin smaller and smaller as if he could disappear it: _this is just the way things are._ “You always do this. Erase yourself. It’s not bravery, Rust.”

“I’m not trying to be brave.”

“Then why—”

“Maggie, don’t lie there and tell me you wouldn’t do anything for your family.”

She bit her lip hard. This time she reached out slow enough for him to move away. The pulse in his wrist jumped under her hand. 

“Rust,” she said, just to have his name on her tongue. 

“Don’t tell Marty.” 

“He’ll find out.” 

“How could he? I’m a man. It’s outside his thinking.” 

Rust wasn’t wrong. It was something Marty only understood from post-mortems; unlike Maggie, he’d never helped wash it from someone’s living body, never looked them in the eye. But she knew the heft of Marty’s attention when it came to his household. The man who was always half-absent in his own home, who looked through his daughters for the television—that was a deliberate withdrawal, grown thicker each year he spent looking at corpses for a living. The Marty she’d fallen in love with noticed when her perfume was a week from empty, that Maisie preferred strawberries quartered, that Audrey slept with the open end of the pillowcase facing away from her. 

Marty leveled that eye on Rust now, too. He had for a while. 

“He’ll find out,” Maggie said again. Then: “I didn’t tell him. About your daughter.” 

The faint warm sounds of her family breathing. Slow, deliberate, Rust twisted his hand in Maggie’s grasp, brought their joined fingers to his cheek. 

“I know,” he said. 

Two days later Rust knew for sure by the way the pale dawn grew too bright in his eyes, sunk down into his joints, solidifying. He felt suspended inside himself like a bug in amber. It hurt to move. Soon it would hurt more. 

When the girls woke he hauled himself upright and tore a couple sheets from the ledger for them: an intricate maze for Maisie to solve, a half-sketched hand for Audrey to finish. Then he went back to fleshing out the maps of the valley where he’d grown up. Elevation, vegetation, waterways, trapping spots, shelters—anything that could help the Harts survive. Rust thought it likely he’d make it as far as the cabin. Possible he’d even find his pop alive there. But then again, he’d thought he himself would die a father and then later he thought he’d die anyway and at each turn he’d been wrong. So he forced his body to dredge up what it remembered while he still could. 

“Figures that thing would make the cut of things you need to survive the apocalypse,” Marty said, nodding at the ledger. 

Rust grunted. 

“Talkative this morning, huh.”

“You so bored you need me to draw an activity sheet for you, like the girls?” 

“Screw you, man,” Marty said amiably, settling deeper into the bunk. Then: “You ever think about the cases we left behind?”

A false note hidden in Marty’s voice like a pebble; hearing it, Maggie looked up from scrubbing the girls’ shirts in a pair of borrowed buckets. Rust knew she didn’t get it. Her in that viola-green blouse in the kitchen, gentle and relentless: _you pick up what you keep and you leave the rest behind._ All his life, Rust had tried to be good at that; never quite managed. Only figured Marty had no skill for it either.

“No,” Rust said. 

“No?” Marty said. “Now, see, that don’t sound right coming from you. You never met a responsibility you didn’t want to tie around your neck like a goddamn albatross.”

“Swear jar, daddy,” Maisie said.

“Swears on boats don’t count,” Marty said. 

“Swears on boats count double,” Maggie said.

“What’s an albatross?” Audrey asked. 

“Yeah, Rust, what’s an albatross?” Marty said.

Marty was smiling, his eyes crinkled. It was too much. Rust shut his eyes, but the colors of their voices still lingered in his mind like oil spills, lurid and smoking. 

“Rust, you okay?” said Maggie. 

Marty, who was closer, moved as if to check his forehead. Rust moved away. He knew he was sweating, irritable, spacey; his hands trembled. He’d counted on Maggie putting it down to the sex. He’d counted on Marty spending a little longer in the jaws of whatever silent crisis had been chewing its way through him the past few days. It was too late to hide it from the girls, who saw everything, but that worried Rust less—the girls already knew, had sensed it the way kids could, that there was something wrong with him. 

“Rust,” Marty said.

“I ran out of pills,” Rust said.

Marty had a silent conversation with Maggie. Rust tried to keep his body from peeling apart.

“Audrey, Maisie, help me empty out these buckets up on deck,” Maggie said. 

The girls looked back at Rust they left. When it was just the two of them Marty said, “I thought you got off that shit. After Ledoux.” 

“I got off most of it.” 

Marty moved close again. Rust braced himself to be touched, but Marty just picked up the ledger, flipping through it. 

“What’s all this?”

“Memories. Information. It’s all jumbled. Like the stones glaciers leave. Stones caught up and jumbled together and deposited at the edge of the world when the ice disappears again, at least until the next—” 

Marty’s face swam out of the haze of Rust’s vision, resolved itself into an expression: dismay. Rust stopped. Swallowed. “It’s important,” he said, as clearly as he could. “You need it, in case something happens. You don’t know how to live up there.”

“What happened to walking hand and hand into extinction?” Marty said.

“What the fuck do you think we’re doing, Marty?” Rust said.

“Yeah. Except you keep trying to let go of my hand when I’m not looking,” Marty snapped. “You gotta cut this shit out, Rust. It ain’t just you anymore.” 

“You still don’t fucking get it. It’s always just me.”

Marty balled up his fists in aggravation. He brought them to his temples and then uncurled them and said slowly, “I know about—you. What you’ve been doing. At night. I know why.”

Rust closed his eyes again. His pulse so swollen it seemed he could see it there, red and heavy inside his eyelids. Marty’s blue-sky voice fractaling out in the dark. Rust rolled onto his side, one hand clutching the edge of the bunk like it was the side of a cliff.

“It’s not just—payment, is it,” Marty said. “You’re queer.”

“I’m a glass with a hole in the bottom.” 

“Illuminating.”

“Women. Men. Anyone. Doesn’t matter. Hardly happens.”

Marty took that in. Closed the ledger carefully, smoothed a hand over its cover. 

“I’m glad I didn’t…know. I mean, before. I wouldn’t have done right by you.” Marty set his jaw, looked down. “I haven’t ever really done right by you. But if he hurts you, I’m going to kill him. I don’t care if we need him. I’ll break his fucking skull and throw him in the ocean.”

“Enough, Marty,” Rust said through the stone in his throat.

“I just mean—”

“Marty. Stop.”

“Okay, Rust,” Marty said.

This whole time they’d been at the edge of the same ledge, the two of them, their hands on each other’s wrists: half pushing, half pulling. Rust felt Marty’s grip shifting and it filled him with dread, slick and loud as cough-syrup. He wanted it to stay the way it was. He didn’t know what to do, otherwise.

That afternoon, the captain left them on a deserted beach in Washington State with what remained of their belongings. He gave back their guns. Marty put a hand on his as he watched the captain recede into the Pacific. Rust turned north, started walking. He didn’t care if Marty shot the man. What was behind him was behind him.


	3. Chapter 3

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Content warnings for suicidal thoughts, depression, and severe illness, alongside the general warnings for discussion of pandemic (this time in a little more detail).

Two hours up the beach they came across a camp in an old state airport: a single bush plane waiting above the tideline, a neat village of tents and lean-tos set among the trees on the bluff. The guards held rifles they knew how to use and their cloth masks showed only their eyes. When a short black woman came forward, the people parted like the Red Sea for Moses. 

A long sizing-up moment shivered between them, tense as porcelain. Marty kept the charm steady. Maggie kept the girls quiet. Rust, thank god, kept his mouth shut. 

The woman was a former search and rescue pilot now flying Coast Guard supply runs up and down the Northwest. Turned out some lab in Vancouver had been researching the virus for years, and they’d send antivirals to anyone willing to test them.

“They kept warning people about a pandemic like this, but nobody really listened.” The woman shrugged. “Guess we’re listening now.”

Seattle was on lockdown. D.C. was still burning. The Southeast had been hit hard: mosquitoes worsening the spread, hurricanes strafing the coast. The National Guard had turned I-40 into a quarantine border that let nothing in or out. 

So Louisiana might as well have been an empty crawfish shell lolling under the waves for all it could offer them now. 

“I’m sorry about your home,” the woman said. It didn’t sound like a lie. “But you’re not getting any closer to mine until I know you’re not sick. You want a safe place to sleep for the night? Beach is right here. Don’t bother us, we won’t bother you.” She crossed her arms. “You want anything else, it’s going to mean fever checks and a fair trade. And if you’re sick, you go to the Olympia ward like everyone else.”

Marty saw Rust opening his mouth. No prize for guessing what his idea of a fair trade might be. Marty reached for his elbow right as Maggie grabbed the other, like they were part of the same motion. 

“We can live with that,” Maggie said. 

They drew back down the shore. Marty almost laughed, it was such a beautiful day to come back into the horror of the world: the salt-fresh air, the sun glowing in the girls’ fair eyelashes. They ran down to the water shrieking with laughter. 

It had taken less than a month for Marty’s world to condense utterly: Maggie, Audrey, Maisie, Rust. A small, clear illusion of wholeness. He thought he’d survive with that. He thought that was worth surviving. Learning the magnitude of what they’d lost felt like someone had picked that clarity up like a snowglobe and smashed it, everything he’d only just gathered spilling out of his hands onto the sand.

“Look at that, we made a deal with strangers and nobody had to put out,” Marty said.

“Jesus, Marty,” said Maggie.

Rust dropped his bag in the sand and sat next to it. “I’m starting to think you’re not over it, man.”

He was watching the girls play, visibly itching for a cigarette. He hadn’t looked at Marty all morning. 

“Stop staring,” Marty said, “you’re gonna freak them out.” 

“I ain’t looking at them.”

“What, are you seeing something?” Maggie said.

But Rust didn’t answer. 

Marty took a deep breath. “What if we stayed here?” 

Rust’s silence grew thicker, like a moss. Maggie pushed her hair out of her face wearily. It was curling in the wet air; she almost looked twenty-two again, except for the shadows under her eyes. 

Marty tried again. “I know you wanted Alaska, Rust, but—look, either we take another month to walk there or we wait here until we can barter a flight. And then we, what, eat moose all winter until it’s safe to see another human being again? Why not just stay here? It’s remote. They’ve got food, medicine. They may be a little standoffish but they ain’t assholes. We wait out their quarantine, we get in with them, and then—” he faltered. The future sheared off like a cliff underneath them. 

“I want that medicine,” Maggie said. “I want to let somebody else keep watch for a little while. They have other kids here. If this is—if this is long-term, it’d be good for the girls to have people their age. It’d be good for _us_ to have people. We can’t do this forever.”

Sweat stood out on Rust’s forehead. “Fine,” he rasped. 

Marty raised his eyebrows at Maggie. “Fine? That’s all you got, Mr. Opinions?” 

“They’re your kids.”

“Thought we talked about this.”

Rust put his head on his knees: a gesture of exhaustion the likes of which Marty had never seen from him. “We can’t protect them here,” he said flatly. “We can’t protect them in Alaska, either. This world is a fucking—thresher. Always has been. The only difference is now you can’t pretend otherwise. You want your daughters safe, you should’ve never had them. But it’s too late for that. So yeah, Marty, _fine_. We can die here as well as anywhere.” 

“You say shit like this,” Marty told him, “and all it does is make me want to go find whoever was driving that car and blow their fucking brains out.” 

A promise he was qualified to make, now: he knew what it looked like, smelled like. He still meant it.

“He’s probably already dead now anyway,” Rust said. “Too bad it doesn’t fucking matter.” 

Marty chewed his lip, at a loss. He’d never loved someone who took it like this, like it was just grit. 

Maggie touched Rust’s nape, gently at first, and then when he didn’t shake her off she started rubbing her thumb back and forth. 

“What was she like?” Maggie said softly. 

The girls’ voices drifted up the slope in little bursts: they’d finished splashing the hell out of their last set of clean clothes, and were now arguing about how to build a sandcastle. The adults sat apart in a well of silence. A deep cool well, boring deeper each second, as if tapping some massive underground reservoir of silence. Marty squeezed Maggie’s free hand. 

“She liked colors.” Rust’s voice was almost unrecognizable. “Mobiles. Stained glass. We had this hummingbird feeder—” A long breath, in and out. “I used to wonder if she heard them, too. Like I do.”

Marty thought about it—the last thing he wanted to do was make Rust feel caged—and then he wrapped a hand around Rust’s ankle. Felt the bone under his thumb. 

A little huff escaped before Marty could stop it. 

“What,” Rust said. 

“Nothing,” Marty said. “Just—last year you kept saying _none of my business, none of my business._ Now look at us.” 

He meant it as absolution for them both: the man grasping bruisingly at the family he’d let slip from his hands and the man pruning every wisp of connection to anyone not dead. Both barely more than ghosts in the daylight now. But Rust clenched his jaw, pulling away from Mary and limping into the trees. 

“Fuck,” Marty said. 

“It’s going to take a while, Marty,” Maggie said. 

He slumped his head into her lap. “You know what I was trying to say?”

“Yeah,” Maggie said softly. He looked up at her: her familiar face, from this new angle as strange and marvelous as a pearl. “He’ll hear us. We just need to be patient.”

That night they all curled up in a pile of blankets between the buckling roots of a pine tree. Marty half-dreamed about some camping trip he’d taken as a kid: his mother asleep in the backseat of the family sedan, stiff with rage, while Marty listened to his father’s snores fill the tent and agonized over how to crawl outside to piss without waking him. 

He jolted awake when Maisie whispered, “Rust, what’s Alaska like?” 

Marty could feel Maggie stir. Rust lay still and warm on his other side. 

“Imagine being underwater in the deep end of the pool,” Rust murmured after a long moment. “And it starts raining, and you can hear it.” Marty closed his eyes. “That’s what the stars are like up there. Like they’re coming through the sky for the first time when you see them. And it feels like you’re underneath the whole world, not standing on top of it. Like it’s bigger than you thought.”

 _Like the lid coming off the jar_ , Marty thought.

Audrey’s voice was hesitant, hopeful: “It sounds beautiful.” 

_Please_. Marty didn’t have a clearer wish than that: _please_. He moved his arm to lay along Rust’s, as if his thoughts could pass between them like static electricity. 

“Yes,” said Rust quietly; and when Marty breathed out a long grateful sigh Rust’s fingers grazed Marty’s wrist, over his pulse, as if measuring how long remained. 

Marty shook Maggie awake somewhere in the black of early morning. 

“Maggie,” he hissed. Adrenaline sizzled through her like lighter fluid. “Maggie, it’s Rust.”

“Mom? Dad? What’s going on?” Audrey said.

The jagged blue glare of the flashlight. Maggie crawled through the nest of her family as Marty pulled the girls out of the way. Rust looked dead already. The only sign of life was the fever burning off him in nearly visible waves. Mechanically, Maggie took his pulse: frantic, hummingbird-quick. _We had this hummingbird feeder—_

Tachycardia, tachypnea, high grade fever, unresponsiveness. Of course it hadn’t been fucking withdrawal. Of course.

“Mom?” Maisie whispered. 

Maggie stripped Rust’s blankets and shirt. “Girls, I want you to go down to the water and wash off, right now. Take a flashlight, take the soap, take a change of clothes and leave your old ones in the water. Don’t go deeper than your knees. Do it, right now. Five minutes.”

“What’s wrong with Rust?”

“Now!”

They went scrambling, Audrey holding tight to Maisie’s hand. 

“That gonna help?” Marty said, opening the first aid kit without being told. 

“Probably not,” Maggie said. “We all have it, Marty. There’s no way we don’t, the way we’ve been living. Two weeks from exposure to symptomatic expression—it must have been that night he went out in Rosalito. Fuck. Sit him up.” 

She spread a crushed acetaminophen tablet on Rust’s tongue and carefully dribbled water into his mouth. Swallow reflex was still there, at least. She thumbed his chin clean. The captain would’ve caught it too, she realized. A brief, vivid image of the boat listing on the ocean, everyone in it dead.

“We need that medicine,” Marty said. 

“We have nothing to trade. Marty, we don’t have _anything_.”

“If we just ask—”

“They’ll send him away. You heard them. You think Olympia’s any better than Lafayette? It’ll kill him.”

Marty smoothed back Rust’s lank hair. Maggie felt something crack in her like a vial. Marty kissed her hard, checked his gun, and hauled Rust over his shoulders. 

“Pack up. Get the girls. Meet me at the plane in ten minutes.”

“Marty—”

“Trust me, sweetheart,” he said, as if he still had to ask.

She led her daughters creeping through the dark water to avoid the sentries. Marty had left Rust slumped against the plane’s skis like a ragdoll. Sweet even in her fear, Maisie reached for him. Maggie had to catch her wrist.

Two figures unpeeled from the trees: Marty, the pilot in front of him with Marty’s gun to her head. 

“Be as quiet as you want, asshole,” the woman spat. “They’re still going to hear the engine.” 

“Ain’t nobody catching up to a plane on foot.” Marty slung a bag from his shoulder into Audrey’s arms. “Maggie, keep the gun on her.”

The metal was warm from her husband’s hand. Maggie held it steady, braced like he’d taught her. Marty heaved Rust into the plane’s cramped seats. 

“Thought you were a nurse,” the woman said to Maggie. “How exactly you going to live with this? Taking lives like this? Because that’s what you’re doing, stealing that medicine. And you know it.”

“Same way I’ve lived with everything else, I suppose,” Maggie said. “Put on your damn mask.” 

Faint shouting from the sentries as the running lights came on. The plane nosed up into the black sky and blackness fell away beneath them, the flaps shuddering, the cabin swelling with a constant dull roar. 

Rust had written the coordinates of the Alaska airstrip in his ledger. Four hours, give or take. Marty sat in the copilot’s seat with Maisie on his lap; he didn’t bother with the gun. Only way the pilot could stop them now was to take the whole plane down, and she wouldn’t. She wanted to live. 

The sun rose beside them: a slow pink stain, the landscape a dark rumpled dress below them, flashing here and there with water like mirror shards. Audrey pressed her face to the glass. 

There weren’t enough headsets for all of them and Maggie didn’t want to shout, so she turned to a blank page in Rust’s ledger and wrote, _Isn’t it beautiful?_

Audrey shook her head. Maggie drew a question mark. Audrey stuck her chin out angrily, so like her father Maggie felt her stomach drop, as if she’d missed a stair. 

_Rust can’t see it_ , Audrey wrote in her childish hand. 

_You can tell him about it when he wakes up._

Audrey looked at her, unreadable, and turned back to the window.

The pilot set them down on an empty airstrip in a valley beat plain as tin. A broken-windowed office, three flat-tired cars, the half-burned shell of a Cessna skewed toward the runway. 

“How the fuck am I supposed to refuel,” said the pilot.

“You seem like a resourceful lady,” Marty said. “I’m sure you’ll figure it out.”

Maggie took what they needed from the bag of antivirals and handed the rest back. “Thank you. I’m sorry.”

“Go to hell,” the pilot said. 

They started walking. The roads were empty; the plain stretched stamp-flat toward the mountains. Gray rain fell. Marty had to stop to lay Rust down, rest. They passed a single bicycle lying in the middle of the blacktop. Its wheels still worked. They maneuvered Rust onto it and walked for a while that way, Maggie and Marty holding him steady on either side, the girls taking turns steering. Then Rust’s map led them off the roads into the woods and they had to carry him again. Exhaustion had given Maggie a body inside her body, and that was where she went: on the outside she walked; on the inside she remembered when her girls were born. Audrey in the middle of the night, small and red and wailing, Marty an absolute wreck. Maisie in midafternoon, already sunny and calm, her sister frowning at her with a two-year-old’s perfect seriousness: _Mommy, how can she sleep if she’s outside your belly?_

“Marty,” said Rust hoarsely. 

“Rust, hey, Rust—” Marty cradled him onto the ground. “You with us?”

Rust’s red gaze lurched to Maggie, the girls. “I shouldn’t be here,” he whispered.

Marty barked a laugh, frayed with relief and frustration. Maggie felt her own mouth twitch. “We’re not doing this, Rust,” she started, and then a gray whipcord man stepped out from the undergrowth with his rifle raised. 

“Better get back where you came from,” he grunted.

Maggie put her hand on her gun. Rust moved his head, painfully slow, and the stranger stopped dead at the sight of him. Lowered the rifle.

“I am back, Pop,” Rust said. 

Travis Cohle frowned and said, “Where you been?” 

“Texas. Louisiana.” Rust’s voice was thin with effort. “Things’re bad. I got them out.”

“Of all the times to gin up an ounce of fucking loyalty.”

“The hell’s that supposed to mean?” Marty said.

“One winter, Pop,” Rust said. ”All I’m asking.”

“How you gonna feed them? They have any idea how to keep warm? Jesus, Rustin. You’re tying yourself to stones.” 

“You’d know,” Rust whispered. Maggie touched his neck, took his pulse. He felt brittle as an empty egg. 

Rust’s father looked him over again. “The hell’s wrong with you? You sick or something?”

Rust started to laugh. 

Travis hadn’t talked to another person in six weeks; he had no idea. He led them the last few miles to his cabin, hearing them out without a flicker in his expression.

“What did he _think_ was going on?” Maggie muttered.

“He’s been ready for the world to end since before I was born,” Rust said. 

Rust's childhood home was a one-room cabin in a clearing, flanked by an outhouse, a smoking shed, and a woodshed. Travis cleared out the woodshed, hung tarps for walls, and installed his son in a nest of blankets. Rust thrashed through them in minutes, his brief lucidity splintering into delirium. 

Travis tried to keep Maggie out. He looked so like Rust: the knife-edge face, the eyes remote and dense as ice inside a glacier. He told her, “Whatever you owe him, this is beyond your obligation.” 

“Love isn’t obligation,” she said. 

“Love is the only obligation,” Travis said. 

“I’m a nurse.”

“You’re a parent. Your children are what matter here.”

Maggie didn’t know how to explain it: the four of them long since tied to Rust’s survival, first Marty then Maggie then the girls, following the turns of his pain like streamers on a weathervane. Only the sickness was new. 

“My family is what matters here,” she told Travis, and pushed past him.

High summer: the nights still mild, days warm and humid, though not like home, where steam rose from the concrete when it rained. Maggie had always despised that thick humidity but found herself missing it now, as if it was a blanket she could pull over herself and pull everything else back into place with it. 

Marty set the girls to work in the raised vegetable beds, tended their dirt-cracked hands as best he could. Maggie tried to keep Rust alive. She kept a makeshift chart, for all the good it could do: temperature, blood pressure, pulse rate, how his lungs sounded, if he’d managed to keep any food down. 

The antivirals seemed to have worked, at least for the rest of them: one day passed without symptomatic expression, then two, then three. Travis swallowed the pills grudgingly. Rust’s fever did not abate.

Marty watched the girls, watched Rust, split firewood for hours on end. They went to sleep in a cabin shrinking by the day as the stacks grew inward from the walls. They began to realize how much they didn’t know about the winter bearing down on them. They began to realize how little they knew about anything. _Love_ , Maggie had said to Travis, before she’d even said it to Marty, to herself: that bruising, staticky thing she could only name because it wasn’t anything else. The empty shape the new world had left behind, as if to look back and be reminded, _this is what I’m not_. As if cutting it away could save it. 

Travis slept beside Rust every night. Maggie and Marty took turns. She felt the shared terror tangled like fishing line between each of their hearts: that the moment they turned away, Rust would slip down into the dark, alone. 

Rust drifted back into his body by degrees. Like a bubble of air trapped in a deep lakebed until some living thing’s passage kicked him loose: up he went, brightening, powerless. A long slow column of awareness. He was warm. He hurt everywhere. He wanted a cigarette so bad his throat itched.

“Here,” someone said. A voice the ragged brown of a mushroom’s gills. _Pop_. 

He helped Rust drink, helped him sit up. Steadied him as blackness swarmed his vision for a long minute.

“How,” Rust said hoarsely. 

“Your people got you here. Used those maps you made.” Travis pulled a blanket back into place. “Don’t know what the hell you were thinking, but those maps were some good work.” 

“Are they—did I—”

“No,” Travis said. Rust had never heard that tone in his father’s voice; didn’t know how to react to it, a peach-soft bloom of color. 

Those first few days Rust slept more than he had in—years. Since Sophia. He did nothing but sleep, sprawling unwieldy gaps that came over him in the middle of listening to Maisie and Audrey bicker about who’d done the best job in the garden, surreal and precious. Rust had never wanted a sibling growing up; it was hard enough just to know Travis. But he’d wanted his mom. He dreamed of her again for the first time in decades: bronze hair like his, a single tattered memory of a dress the color of a wine glass ringing. It had taken a long time for Rust to hate her, but when he did he had a lifetime of imagined memories to tip onto the fire: dreams of her taking him away from Alaska, keeping him warm, unfolding some kind of peace in his head like an envelope. 

Sophia’s birth was what did it. No matter how strange and terrible Rust knew himself to be, he’d been as small as his daughter, once. Just that small and empty of fear. It was easy to understand the people he took apart in the box, the murderers and rapists, all Crash’s hollowed-out siblings. But Rust would never, never understand how his mother could have left the child he’d been once. 

Audrey and Maisie hadn’t been strangers to fear for a long time, and yet they filled the place he’d grown up with aliveness like little gold bells. He didn’t know what to do.

“You should’ve left me,” he said to Maggie the first night she and Marty came out to the woodshed. Travis had left without a word, the kerosene lamp butting up against the blue darkness as the flap opened and closed.

“Don’t lie there and tell me you wouldn’t do anything for your family,” she said. 

Rust knew Maggie had kept her silence about that night on the boat; the weight swaying on her words didn’t take shape for Marty. And yet he put his big blunt hand on Rust’s shoulder, clumsy and sincere. Something had slid into place beneath them. Tectonic. Rust didn’t know why they were showing it to him. He didn’t know what had happened while he’d been in the dark that could explain any of it—the soft fruit blooming in the rock of his father’s voice, the girls’ green contentment, the way Marty and Maggie talked Rust to sleep with their glittering voices and were still there when he woke up. 

It was days before he could walk steady. More than a week before he felt strong enough to hunt, though they needed it, needed to smoke all they could for a winter with six mouths. The familiar pleasure of butchering, the meat’s pink a sound like velvet. It upset Audrey. He didn’t know how to comfort her: life had always been like this for him, a substance without spirit. 

“It’s okay to be upset, honey,” Maggie said. “Sometimes we have to do sad things to survive, now.”

Marty leaned his shoulder into Rust’s. Rust wanted to tell him _it didn’t matter, it’s over,_ but the words stuck in his throat. 

“It’s not fair,” Audrey said tearfully. She hadn’t cried once, the whole time. 

“We can make it fair, if we use it well,” Rust said. “We gotta use the whole body. Then it’s like we’re both just animals.” 

“I want to learn,” Maisie said. 

So Rust and Maisie and Marty knelt waiting while Audrey closed the buck’s milky eyes, whispering, “I’m sorry. Thank you.”

Afterwards Maggie and Marty both touched Rust on the back, minutes apart, as if in thanks. That night when they came out to the woodshed, they laid on either side of him and let the copper silence build until Rust said, almost desperate, “I ain’t good for it.”

“Mm. Bullshit,” Marty grunted, already half asleep.

Maggie nudged her head into Rust’s shoulder. She smelled like cedar and sweat. “You’ve been good for everything else,” she murmured. “Why not this?”

Rust stared at the rough-hewn ceiling he'd rebuilt himself after a storm the summer he was fourteen and demanded of Marty, “Since when are you queer?” 

Marty didn't answer for so long Rust thought he was asleep, or pretending to be. “The world ended,” he mumbled at last. “Ain't no reason not to be.”

They cut and cured the lumber to build another sleeping room onto the cabin, then moved the stacks of firewood back into the woodshed. Rust recovered enough for the insomnia to return. He’d lie in the dark, listening to them breathe, considering the ten-mile hike into the valley to loot a convenience store for cigarettes. He could be back before the sun rose. Compared to some things, it’d be easy.

One night he wanted to die with such a clear precision that he got as far as tying his boots to go save his own life with a carton of fucking cigarettes, and then a hallucination swallowed the door in a shimmering purple curtain like an aurora of sinew. 

He was still sitting there on the floor when Travis rose at dawn to check the traps. His father regarded him for a long pale minute. He tried to touch Rust on the shoulder and Rust jerked a hand up. 

“You can blame me for this, if you want,” Travis said. “I can’t say it’s a thought that never crossed your mother’s mind. But it wasn’t in her in the bone like it’s in us.” 

Rust didn’t answer. After a little while Travis said, “It’d be one thing for me to bury you. But I won’t bury you in front of them when you’re the reason they’re here in the first place,” and then he left. 

Rust thought about moving before the girls could wake up and see him like this. He thought about that one night Crash had passed out on the concrete stoop of his shitty apartment and woken up with ants plucking the sweat from his face. He thought about the moment the medic had realized the boy in Rust’s arms was dead. He thought about the wasteland that used to be a planet, millions dead, millions on the ledge, just as brutal as he'd always imagined. He thought about the first time he woke up in the woodshed to see Maggie and Marty sleeping beside him, stiff and restless on the dirt floor, close enough to touch. 

But all of that was just distraction swirling around the pinhole in the middle of everything, which was Sophia. 

“Rust,” Marty said. “Hey, Rust, it’s okay, don’t—here, let me—” and then there were arms around him. 

“Rust, what happened?” Maggie said. 

“I shouldn’t be here,” Rust said. 

“Rust,” Marty said. Maggie braced her hands on Rust’s knees. “What happened?” 

His face was wet. He covered it. He felt the girls slide tentatively into place between their parents. 

“I was lying there in the dark. I thought I did it.” The words spilled out, uncontrollable. All that touch turning his body to a sieve. “I thought, I got you here, I kept you safe. I finally kept somebody alive. And so I let myself keep sinking down into the dark. This darkness that kept getting bigger and bigger, warm, a kind of substance. And I was…nothing inside it. Just this thin smear of consciousness getting washed away. I was ready. I _wanted_ it. And I—I felt my daughter there. And I knew—” he was weeping now. “I _knew_ she loved me. I could feel it, underneath everything else, like I could sink down and disappear in it. So I did. And then I woke up.” 

Someone’s hand smoothing over his skull. Their hands on his shoulders, legs. 

A kiss on his temple. Maggie. “She loves you, Rust.” 

“Let’s go on outside,” Marty said. “Get a little air. Get yourself back.”

“Can’t. There’s an aurora in front of the door.”

“You don’t like to touch them, do you. Your visions.” Marty leaned back against the wall, knees cracking. “That’s all right. We’ll just sit here a spell. Come here, sweetheart,” and Rust thought he was talking to Maggie, one of the girls, but Marty scooped him around the neck and steered him into his arms. Left his hand rubbing the bone behind Rust’s ear. 

“You remember telling us about auroras, Rust?” Maggie said. 

“He said they sound like pipe organs,” Maisie whispered. 

“That’s right.” Maggie leaned against Rust’s other side, helped the girls stretch out their long fawn legs. “Purple and red and green. We’ll be able to see them here, right?”

“Cold nights are best. Clearer. It depends on the sun, the solar wind.” Rust wiped his face. “Some years are better than others.” 

“We’re not going home again, are we,” said Audrey. 

Marty’s breathing swelled under Rust: they rose together, in and out and in. He said, “Not for a long time, baby.” 

“So is this our home now?” Maisie said. 

“I like it here,” Audrey said. “Can we stay?”

“Ask Rust,” Maggie said. “It’s his and his dad’s house.”

Audrey touched Rust’s shin as carefully as she had the buck’s soft eyelid. “Rust, can we stay?”

“How about it, Rust,” Marty said low in his ear. “Can we stay?” 

Rust gripped Marty with one hand and Maggie with the other. With his eyes closed their voices rippled vivid across the darkness. And then, as the morning sun warmed the cabin, gold slipped inside his eyelids, pouring into him like a glass, until everything was wet with light. 

“Yeah,” Rust said, blinking. “Okay.”

**Author's Note:**

> This fic is, obviously, me sitting in the middle of a pandemic and Working Through Some Shit. It’s nice to imagine escaping to a beautiful place where sickness doesn’t exist, but we’re no more able to slip loose from the responsibility we bear others than Rust is. Hashtag wear a mask, etc. etc. 
> 
> If you enjoyed this fic, please consider looking into a couple organizations that do relevant work:
> 
> The Alaska Network on Domestic Violence and Sexual Assault, which supports survivors with shelter, counseling, advocacy, support groups, and other programs. [Learn more](https://andvsa.org/who-we-are/about-us/) and [donate](https://andvsa.org/get-involved/donate/).
> 
> Southern Fried Queer Pride, an Atlanta-based nonprofit that empowers Black queer and trans communities in the South through the arts. [Learn more](http://www.southernfriedqueerpride.com/our-vision) and [donate](http://www.southernfriedqueerpride.com/donate).
> 
> Thanks for reading.


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